Flamingo. Pluck the flamingo, wash, truss, and put it in a saucepan; add water, dill and a little vinegar. Half-way through the cooking make a bouquet of leek and coriander and let it cook with the bird. When it is nearly done, add defrutum to give it colour. Put in a mortar pepper, caraway, coriander, asafoetida root, mint, rue; pound; moisten with vinegar, add Jericho dates, pour over some of the cooking-liquor. Put in the same saucepan, thicken with cornflour, pour the sauce over the bird, and serve. The same recipe can also be used for parrot.

My man is a pauper and I am an old woman with a daughter and a son, this boy, and this nice girl besides, five in all. If three of us get a dinner, the other two must share with them only a tiny barley-cake. We wail miserably when we have nothing, and our complexions grow pale with lack of food. The elements and sum of our livelihood are these: bean, lupine, greens, turnip, pulse, vetch, beechnut, iris bulb, cicada, chickpea, wild pears, and that god-given inheritance of our mother-country, darling of my heart, a dried fig.